Rising in the east

If you have clear skies this week, you might want to take a look at Jupiter. It’s in opposition to the sun as viewed from the earth, and it is also the closest it’s been to the earth in 70 years.

Update: I put my longest telephoto lens on my camera last night to see if I could get a picture of the planet. It worked, but not very well; I need a much longer lens for astrophotography or, preferably, a telescope with a camera adapter. I was able to resolve the planet and three of the moons, but the image was too small to see any detail beyond that.

I was in a bit of a silly mood after that, so I took an excerpt from Host’s “Jupiter” and ran it through a few instances of a pair of software emulations of the Roland Jupiter 8 synthesizer. (I used this two-cello arrangement as the basis for the piece.)

If it’s not your speed, there’s plenty of other “Jupiter” music out there, from Mozart to Joe Satriani.